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2005 Conference of Ford Fellows
Plenary Session Abstracts
Sandy Marie Grande, Connecticut College
”At the Crossroads of Democracy and Sovereignty: Preparing an Educated Citizenry for the 21st Century”
The United States is a nation defined by its original sin: the genocide of American Indians. Everything afterwards is just another chapter in the fall from grace. And, just as in the Christian creation story, there is no going back. No reparation, no penance, no atonement can ever erase the eternity of genocide – the original “carnal knowledge.” Such an inauspicious beginning raises significant questions about the viability of this so-called democratic experiment: Is it possible for democracy to grow from the seeds of tyranny? Can the “good-life” be built upon the deaths of thousands?
These questions and others are addressed in my book Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), which is an exploration of the intersections between critical educational theories and Native American social and political thought. In this text, I maintain that as indigenous communities continue to be transformed by movement, access, border crossing, and transgression, it becomes even more pertinent for American Indian scholars to abandon what Robert Allen Warrior (1995) refers to as the “death dance of dependence” or the vacillation between wholesale adoption of Anglo-Western theories and the declaration by American Indian scholars that they need nothing outside of themselves to understand their world or place within it. As the geography of Indian Country diverges and expands, so too must its intellectual borders.
This work is arguably most important to American Indian youth caught at the crossroads of tradition and contemporary globalization. In the liminal spaces of everyday life they are the ones on the front lines, forced to navigate the ongoing and dilatory effects of colonization at the same time the continued saliency of the colonialist project is denied. As Arif Dirlik (1999) notes, “Today Native Americans struggle not only with colonial histories but also with postmodern and cultural critics who take for granted that nations are ‘imagined,’ traditions are ‘invented,’ subjectivities are ‘slippery’ (if they exist at all), and cultural identities are myths.” In other words, the move to the “post-colonial” is highly suspect among the nations remaining internal colonies.
Moreover, at a time when 90% of Native American students attend non-Indian or predominantly white schools, it is doubly imperative for Indigenous educators to not simply insist on “culturally relevant” curricula but work to transform the institutional structures of schools and society. With this in mind, my presentation highlights points of tension and intersection between prevailing Indigenous and “mainstream” perspectives on the socio-political context for education, focusing on issues of “democracy” and “sovereignty.” Connections will be made to future of education and what it means to develop a critical citizenry in the 21st century.
Richard D. Robinson, University of California, Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
”Nanoscience: Big News form the World of the Little”
Nanoscience and nanotechnology are at the forefront of the next scientific-industrial revolution. Imaginative new applications have the potential to make our lives cleaner, safer, and more efficient. Beneficial technologies are being developed in areas as diverse as drug development and drug delivery (could we make a nano-robot to fight a cancer cell?) and directed evolution (is it possible to build a living being atom by atom?), to micro-sized computers (can single electrons be used to store information?) and diminutive optic devices (are single photon sources a reality?).
And the money’s there; the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, passed in 2003, allocated nearly $3.7 billion to nanotechnology from 2005 to 2008. This compares to the $750M allocated in 2003. Globally, the current estimated total investment in nanotechnologies is around 5 billion. Patents have increased fourfold from 1995 to 2001 and have the potential to be worth a global market value of $1 trillion by 2011.
But what is this science and why is it so novel?
In this talk I will give a simplified overview of nanoscience and discuss some of the latest developments. Specifically, I’ll cover the synthesis of nanoparticles, the methods we use to “look” at objects 1000 times smaller than a human hair, and the properties that make them so promising. I’ll also present some of the interesting findings from my current lab, the Alivisatos Group, at UC Berkeley, including oriented attachment of nanoparticles through sub-stoichiometric cation exchange.
Gabriela M. Soto Laveaga, University of California, Santa Barbara
”Jungles, the Pill and Fertile Mexicans: The Unexpected Birthplace of the Pill”
The pill came from wild yams? Yes. In the early 1940s chemists discovered that compounds found in some wild Mexican yams mimicked how steroid hormones functioned in the human body. This startling breakthrough led directly to the discovery of oral contraceptives and cortisone, to name but two of the most prominent pharmaceutical products derived from yams. The discovery was proclaimed, “the most important since penicillin,” but it took years before large pharmaceutical houses could commercialize the yams. The problem lay in that it was virtually impossible to get to the yams that grew in dense Mexican jungles. This roadblock was resolved when, over the course of thirty years, 150,000 Mexican peasants silently emptied the jungles of barbasco with the promise of being paid in cash for the yams. As the topic of socio-cultural history the root pickers are the pivotal actors of my current book manuscript and of this talk.
This is the first time that research has examined the crucial role of these particular peasants and evaluated their impact at the national and global level. The emergence of these erstwhile unknown root pickers into the national spotlight in the 1970s was due to a confluence of local, national, and world factors. This presentation examines the internal political shifts, social unrest, and increased global use of synthetic hormones as the backdrop to understand the political and economic power that the peasants came to wield and then just as spectacularly lose.
This work illustrates how an ignored social group conceived its own role in the national and world markets and how this “imagined” role led to subsequent actions at the national level. This part of the nation’s history provides an exciting new layer of interpretation of how a country as socially heterogeneous as Mexico stretched and molded the definition of modern nation. In addition, it explores how the malleable notion of “peasant” was linked to medicinal plants and consequently, using a nationalist rhetoric, was used to oust transnational companies. In analyzing ways in which peasants chose to define themselves as root pickers rather than as indigenous peoples or as a peasant “class,” one begins to understand how pervasive the nationalist rhetoric of the time truly was. In addition, it reminds us of the unexpected impact of science discovery in the most unlikely of places
The presentation will center on the unforeseen consequences of the global search for medicinal plants by answering; How do local people incorporate, reshape and reinterpret knowledge that filters out into their spaces during the continued search for plants that heal? Combined archival research and oral history from more than fifty chemists, peasants, and bureaucrats, will demonstrate that despite increased government intervention, local peasant groups managed to negotiate their autonomy and re-invent themselves within government-sanctioned institutions by using chemical terms and laboratory knowledge once alien to them. Finally, by analyzing the history of a particular case of medicinal plant, this presentation helps us to understand local ramifications of the ongoing search for medicinal plants in the world’s remote regions. In addition, the multidisciplinary nature of the book, on which this talk is based, speaks to a variety of audiences; those interested in reproductive health, health policy, history of medicine, chemistry and ethnobotany (steroids, oral contraceptives, patent medication, medicinal plants); historians of socio-political transformations; commodity studies in Latin America; cultural studies - in particular identity formation and appropriation - peasant agency, globalization, and bio-prospecting. 
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